In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Her unrestrained alcoholism, the terrible seizures that led to scenes and unforgivable insults, and her obscene language—“She was vulgar beyond belief,” said a friend—soon became common knowledge and left her a social outcast. “Wives would literally flee,” said another friend, if they heard she was coming.

  Adele Lovett, Robert’s wife, decided that Josephine had gone “plumb crazy”; and it turned out that she had. At the end of 1940, she suffered a nervous breakdown and entered a world of hallucinations: “the Reds” were out to destroy her and her family, she cried.

  Adele Lovett persuaded the Forrestals to hospitalize Josephine for psychiatric help, but after two weeks she left the hospital, declined further treatment, and along with her husband, refused to admit that the breakdown had happened. Forrestal neither divorced her nor sent her to an institution, but instead tried with no success to hide a condition that neither he nor she would admit was an illness.

  It meant that at a typical dinner party, “Jim spent the entire evening with his head in his hands” as one outrage followed another; that a butler had to be instructed to watch her constantly; and that Forrestal repeatedly was interrupted at work: once she kicked a little child in the street and her husband had to send a naval aide to pull her away before the police could arrest her. Forrestal acted as though the situation did not exist, except that he resumed the active womanizing for which he had been known earlier in life.

  THE SPRING OF 1941 was a depressing one for FDR. He was given no relief from the war news, and the news was terrible. The Germans were victorious on every front. It was not easy even to imagine how they could be stopped. And the President himself was almost continuously unwell: colds, influenza, anemia, bleeding hemorrhoids. He took to his bed.

  Misjudging the situation, Bill Bullitt, who wanted to see the President, decided that the White House staff was being overly protective of Roosevelt’s health. Bullitt had grievances and wanted to air them.

  Though he did not know it, Bullitt’s troubles had begun on his return from France, when he had told reporters that the Vichy government was not fascist and that Marshal Pétain was a great patriot. “Billy was all wet about Pétain” and “Pétain was able to twist Bullitt around his finger,” FDR told a friend of Bullitt’s—though typically not Bullitt himself. He assured Bullitt that he remained ambassador to France and that after he had taken his holiday in the United States, he would be going back to France: to its new capital at Vichy. But at the same time, FDR set about finding himself a new ambassador, preferably a military figure who might be able to influence Pétain on a soldier-to-soldier basis. Even though Pétain had sold out to the Germans, thought the President, some use might be made of him.

  FDR had offered the job first to Pershing (who refused) and then to Admiral William D. Leahy, the former chief of naval operations (who accepted). Newspapers quoted Bullitt as saying that he was staying on—indeed, he had a letter from FDR saying so—and yet they reported that Leahy was in fact replacing him. To Bullitt’s bitter you-told-me-I-was-staying-on accusations, the President replied: “I know, Bill. But I forgot.… Just let it go.” That was not good enough for Bullitt, who kept hammering away: “… what on earth am I going to do after you put me in that awful position?… What am I going to say to the press? This is shocking.… Well, this is certainly a funny one, if anything ever was funny. It certainly leaves me in a spot.” On and on he went, despite FDR’s repeated admonition to “let it go.”

  Kennedy had resigned himself to returning to private life, and had channeled his political ambitions into the career of his oldest son. But Bullitt would not let go. He was critical of the President’s policy toward the European war. He muttered against Hopkins and his ignorance of foreign affairs—for Hopkins and Harriman now were the President’s eyes and ears in Europe, while Hopkins had become FDR’s chief foreign policy confidant. Believing that these were positions he once had filled, and knowing that he did not do so now, Bullitt was jealous.

  But mostly Bullitt attacked Roosevèlt’s friend Sumner Welles, a contemporary and rival, whom he blamed for taking the undersecretary job at State that Bullitt had wanted for his family friend R. Walton (“Judge”) Moore. Welles also stood in Bullitt’s way if, as seems likely, the discarded ambassador to France now aimed at becoming undersecretary or secretary of state himself.

  On April 23, 1941, Bullitt was admitted to see the ailing President. He said that Judge Moore, on his deathbed, had entrusted him with certain papers of utmost importance to be given to the President—which Bullitt now did. The papers showed that when drunk, aboard a train, Welles had made homosexual propositions to black sleeping-car porters. Bullitt said that “Moore had felt that the maintenance of Welles in public office was a menace to the country since he was subject to blackmail by foreign powers.…”

  From the FBI, Roosevelt knew that Bullitt had collected the documents himself and therefore was inventing some or perhaps even all of what he was saying about Moore and the scene at his deathbed.

  Bullitt claimed he already had discussed the matter with Hull, who had said that “he considered Welles was worse than a murderer.” Roosevelt said the problem had been dealt with, for he had taken steps to ensure that Welles would never do it again, but Bullitt said that was not the point: “the question was not one of future acts but of past crimes.…”

  The President said that he did not want to let Welles go because he was useful. But Bullitt returned to the charge: FDR, he said, “was thinking of asking Americans to die in a crusade for all that was decent in human life. He could not have among the leaders of a crusade a criminal like Welles.”

  Bullitt said that he personally would refuse to take any State Department job unless Welles was fired. He hinted that the information in his possession might give rise to a criminal prosecution that would besmirch the Roosevelt administration. He closed with what sounded like an ultimatum: he would expect to hear from Roosevelt by the end of the week.

  The President rang for his military aide, General Edwin (“Pa”) Watson. “Pa, I don’t feel well,” he said. “Please cancel all my appointments for the rest of the day.” He wanted to be taken back to his room.

  It was a kind of ugliness Roosevelt could not face—or at any rate, chose not to. He would do nothing about Bullitt or Welles. Bullitt was to continue his campaign against Welles, always on the edge of making his charges in public, for the next two years; and Roosevelt and his man in the State Department would live in the shadow of that.

  THE LARGEST ATTACK in military history took the Soviet Union completely by surprise at three in the morning, Sunday, June 22, 1941. The United States and Great Britain had warned the Soviets of the impending German invasion, which they had learned of through their own intelligence sources, but Joseph Stalin refused to believe them.

  Thousands of warplanes, thousands of tanks, hundreds of thousands of motor vehicles, and 3 million German troops burst into the Soviet domains. Stalin, suffering some sort of breakdown, retreated to his dacha and stayed incommunicado for a week as the panzers ripped through his empire.

  The War Department and the army advised the President that the Soviet Union could hold out for no more than three months. But even that much respite, Stimson pointed out, would allow the United States Navy to begin escorting convoys across the Atlantic to England while German attention was directed elsewhere. And Roosevelt, looking forward hopefully to the autumn rains and winter snows that could hamper or stop the German invasion of Russia, cheerfully observed that if the Soviets could survive for three months, they could survive for nine—until spring.

  Churchill’s response to the German invasion had been an immediate offer of all possible aid. Roosevelt was less forthcoming, but after a few weeks he let his fact finder investigate. Hopkins flew to Moscow at the end of July to establish contact and to lay the groundwork for later extension of lend-lease to Russia. He planned then to join FDR and Churchill on the momentous occasion of their first conference.

 
; From Russia, Hopkins, seemingly on the verge of death but able to recover after sleeping night and day, returned to Britain, where he boarded a British battleship, the Prince of Wales. Churchill, with a staff, joined him, and they embarked for Newfoundland in Canada, where by secret prearrangement they were met by an American heavy cruiser, the Augusta, carrying FDR, Welles, Harriman, and the American army, navy, and air force chiefs.

  At the Atlantic Conference (August 9–12), the President and the prime minister, meeting in person for the first time since they were introduced two decades earlier, developed an easy personal relationship. FDR welcomed Churchill to dinner aboard the Augusta the first night. The following morning, August 10, Roosevelt and his party went to the Prince of Wales for Sunday services. The British and American crews joined in singing hymns chosen by Churchill: “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and “Eternal Father Strong to Save.”

  On August 11 the work of the conference began on three levels. Diplomats held talks with their opposite numbers, as did military leaders; while the President and the prime minister held talks of their own. After listening to a report by Hopkins on his trip to Moscow, FDR followed Churchill’s lead in proposing massive aid to the Soviet Union.

  Little took place in the way of military planning. Members of the American delegation stressed that the United States had no intention of entering the war. The British military chiefs were disappointed to find the Americans “living in a different world,” remote from the European conflict. The army seemed at least a year or two away from being able to think of anything but trying to equip itself. From Washington came the welcome news that the Congress, albeit by a margin of only one vote, had given General Marshall the extended conscription program for which he had pleaded; now it was possible to start to create an American army that at least could defend itself if attacked.

  In Newfoundland FDR was able to address his fear that Britain, as in the earlier European war, might make secret territorial or other pledges to Russia’s government or to other Allied governments about the postwar settlement. A high official of the British Foreign Office supplied the necessary assurances. Showing that he had avoided yet another of Wilson’s mistakes, FDR demonstrated that he had pinned down Britain to an unselfish set of war goals while he still exercised enough leverage over British policy to do so. The goals proclaimed by the two leaders and known as the Atlantic Charter drew a line between them and their Axis enemies. The charter in effect said that the United States and Britain, unlike the Axis powers, did not intend to acquire any new territory at a peace settlement, and that they would fully respect the legitimate rights of all peoples and countries everywhere.

  The final communiqué pledged the United States and Great Britain to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Was this a promise to liberate countries ruled by the British empire? In the years that followed Churchill said no, that the language should be interpreted restrictively, while Roosevelt felt otherwise.

  Thus the apparent unity achieved at the conference masked continuing fundamental differences between the two countries on world politics. Earlier in the year FDR already had staked out a position more visionary than Churchill’s by setting out (in his State of the Union message to Congress) the four freedoms that he said everybody should enjoy: freedom of speech and expression; religious freedom; freedom from want; and freedom from fear, to be secured in part by universal disarmament.

  But on the establishment of a new League of Nations in the postwar world, it was the prime minister, not the President, who took the more idealistic stance. In his draft of the charter, Churchill proposed pledging support for a postwar international organization; but FDR struck out that pledge, and instead inserted a demand that the aggressor states, once defeated, be disarmed. FDR said that raising the League issue would be bad politics in the United States, where it would excite “suspicions and opposition.” Besides, he said, he did not believe a League would be effective. He said he preferred a postwar settlement in which the globe was policed by the United States and Great Britain* at least for the time being, for FDR said that “the time had come to be realistic.”

  For Churchill, a potential domestic political problem was caused by not raising the League issue. He felt obliged to cable London urgently to Clement Attlee, leader of the opposition Labour party and a member of the coalition cabinet, to secure his agreement to the President’s proposed language. Labour, pacifist in the 1920s and 1930s, was of course very pro-League and could be expected to be disappointed that no mention of international organization was made in the Atlantic Charter.

  On the American side, Welles was dismayed by Roosevelt’s disparagement of the League. FDR told him that “nothing could be more futile than the reconstitution of a body such as … the League of Nations.” Welles argued that at least there should be an assembly in which the small countries could, if nothing else, complain in public. He and Hopkins argued against the President, who in the end allowed Welles to insert vague language referring to a “wider and permanent system of general security.” This final language showed that the continuing intellectual hold of Woodrow Wilson on his onetime followers in the Roosevelt administration was so strong that not even the President himself could overcome it completely.

  A couple of months after the Atlantic Charter was proclaimed, the debate within the Roosevelt coalition between the followers of TR and those of Woodrow Wilson became public. In a speech to the American Bar Association, Navy secretary Knox proposed that after the war, the American and British navies should join together to police the world. He said that such a force could guarantee peace for at least a century. His was a vision inspired by TR and FDR.

  Welles replied in a speech at Wilson’s tomb. He appealed to the American people to “turn again for light and for inspiration to the ideals of that great seer, statesman, patriot, and lover of his fellow men—Woodrow Wilson.…”

  THE ATLANTIC CONFERENCE disbanded in mid-August 1941 with much accomplished. As a partnership between Britain and the United States now had been established, a joint mission headed by Harriman and Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s minister of aircraft production, was sent out to Russia to set up a supply operation on behalf of the two countries.

  A second major outcome of the conference was an American commitment to the battle of the Atlantic. The U.S. Navy was ordered to escort convoys all across the western Atlantic to the maritime frontiers of Britain, a line drawn by the President on a map he tore out of a National Geographic magazine. This in turn freed the Royal Navy to guard convoys sent to Murmansk for Russia. The Americans were under public orders from their President to shoot German U-boats on sight. America had become some sort of a belligerent in the conflict without having fully joined in it.

  On returning to England, Churchill told his war cabinet that FDR had said he would become more and more provocative to Germany in the Atlantic and that “everything was to be done to force an ‘incident.’ ” If indeed Roosevelt said so, he was far in advance of the diplomatic and military members of his delegation, who gave their British counterparts quite a different impression. The meeting in Newfoundland had been, in Churchill’s words, “something really big.” He had made a giant step toward forging the special and personal relationship with FDR that would make it possible to win the war.

  Two months after the conference, Roosevelt wrote a letter to Churchill in which for the first time he addressed him as “Dear Winston.” A few days later he sent a longhand note, ending: “I wish I could see you again!”

  * The Soviet Union, fighting at the time for sheer survival, did not enter into Roosevelt’s calculations as a great power.

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  A SECOND SUMMONS TO GREATNESS

  There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go al
l out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. I rather guess that the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.

  —Joseph Grew, U.S. ambassador to Japan, from Tokyo, January 27, 1941

  IN EARLY AUGUST the German armies in Russia slowed. The retreating Soviet forces, though they had suffered staggering losses, had not collapsed. The brutality of German occupation began to unite the diverse nationalities of the Soviet Union against the invaders; and their determination to fight on meant that Hitler’s goal of ending the war in September could not be met.

  But within weeks the Germans were back on the offensive. In the late summer and early autumn of 1941 they scored two of the greatest victories in military history: vast encirclements, one around Kiev, the other around the river town of Vyazma on the road to Moscow, in which a million and a half Russian prisoners were taken. In all, the Russians had lost 4 million men, killed or captured; the Germans, only 560,000.

  In early September Stalin wrote to Churchill that the Soviet Union was being destroyed with impunity by the Nazis because they knew the threat from the west was mere bluff. Their strategy always had been to pick off countries one at a time, and now they were conquering Russia secure in the knowledge that Britain would not come to her aid. Unless Britain opened a second front by invading France or the Balkans, and sent vast supplies to the Soviet Union immediately, Russia would be defeated. The Soviet ambassador who delivered the letter hinted that unless Britain fulfilled Stalin’s demands, the Soviet ruler might come to terms with Hitler: he might sign a separate peace.

  Churchill could not promise the second front, but pledged half the tanks and planes Stalin demanded, saying the United States would supply the other half. Apologizing later to his American partner for making guarantees in his name, Churchill told FDR that the “moment may be decisive.”

  THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH to go around: that was the challenge faced by Roosevelt in the autumn of 1941. There was not enough to supply both the United States and Britain, not enough to supply both Britain and Russia, not enough to supply both the army and the navy, and not enough to supply both the Pacific and Atlantic fleets.